


You Bet Your Life

by sophiahelix



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-14
Updated: 2006-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-19 13:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A different kind of ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Bet Your Life

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: An idea that sort of blindsided me after reading several standard-issue future-fics lately.

They work it out on a rainy April day, when they've stopped at a gas station on their way back from lunch and she's trying to fill up her little car. The pump is heavy and awkward in her hand, and gusts of rain keep blowing into her face, and she can see him making faces at her through the smeared glass of the passenger window. She sticks her tongue out at him, then gestures with the pump, miming _you do it!_. He gets out of the car, long legs stretching out, feet landing in a puddle, and shuts the door with his hip.

"Trouble, little lady?" he drawls, leaning his elbow on the roof of the car, forgetting it's wet. He jerks upright, shaking his wet sleeve, looking dismayed and utterly dorky, and she bursts into laughter.

He shuts her up with a kiss, his hand on the back of her head, where her hair is damp. She's still holding the gas pump and it feels slightly dangerous and off-kilter, just like everything about this moment.

The he yanks the pump out of her hand and fills up the gas tank perfectly, and she stops herself from making a dirty joke about that, because he's giving her a look like he wants to kiss her again.

It's funny, how being together at last makes it obvious that they're going to quit their jobs, when it would have seemed like the biggest thing they had in common. They talk about it later that night, though, the sheets of her bed tangled around his feet and her head resting on his stomach. He strokes her hair and tells her he's just been socking away his raise, on top of the money left from the trip to Australia he never took. She feels bad about taking his money and says so, but he says he's not going anywhere without her and he's not letting her stay, either.

She thinks about the hell he put her through last winter, dating Karen on and off and ducking her invitations to lunch, until Karen finally moved to New York, and decides she'll let him do it.

People at work aren't as upset or surprised as she would have expected. The merger has put a strain on everybody and they've already lost two of the Stamford staff, plus Stanley right around Christmas and Creed when he just stopped showing up one day. The office feels less like a dysfunctional family and a lot more like work, and she's kind of sad to say goodbye on their last day but she doesn’t even cry like she did when she left her last job.

She makes herself go to the warehouse, alone. Roy's nicer than she'd hoped. He shuffles his feet and tells her it's good, he's going to quit too now and maybe go in with his brother doing air-conditioning subcontracting, and she smiles and hugs him and walks away, dizzy with gratitude that he isn't going to be her life anymore, not ever again.

They fly to Paris the next day and they don't come back for six months. It was a tossup between nicer accommodations and a longer stay, and she finally pushed away the brochures for quaint hotels and said, "I just want to be _gone_ ," so they line up a series of hostels instead. She wanted Paris to be the first European city she sees, though.

It's May, so the chestnuts aren't in bloom but the rain has stopped, and it's as full of tourists as any city she's ever seen, and when she sees the faint silver glint of familiar architecture peeking over the horizon, not the whole tower but just the spire, warm, silly tears trickle down her cheeks and she turns to him and they kiss right there in the street, exactly like you're supposed to in Paris.

When they get back in November all their laundry smells and they're dead sick of trains and languages that aren't English and food that isn't ever quite right, but it still hurts, just a little, to step off the airplane corridor and onto the floor at the La Guardia terminal. She squeezes his hand, too tight, probably, but he looks back at her like he knows.

His brother lets them know they've overstayed their welcome by throwing away all her toiletries on the bathroom counter, even though they've been out looking for an apartment every day since they got to New York. They finally suck it up and move out to Queens, even though it's a long train ride in for their temp jobs, and they're the only people in the neighborhood who don't speak Greek.

Their schedules get all off, because somehow he keeps getting swing-shift jobs. Sometimes she lies on the futon in the bedroom and looks at the weird yellow mottling on the ceiling and just feels herself breathe, fascinated and horrified by the fact that this is what she's doing now, because every single thing in her life is different from what it used to be. When he gets home at night she puts her arms around him and drags him into bed, where they watch terrible network television and eat dry cereal for dinner. Later, in the middle of the night, they make love the way they did in the hostels in Europe, pressed close together, making soft sounds, moving slow and quiet and deep. He still has this look, like he can barely believe what he's seeing, and she hopes he never loses it.

Eventually they get better jobs and she quits being scared to walk back from the train by herself at night and they memorize the bus lines and start going to new restaurants and street festivals and weird museums and all the other stuff you're supposed to do when you live in New York. A couple of his friends move to the city, because he's that kind of guy, and she makes a few friends when she starts night classes at Queens College, and pretty soon they do things in groups and they’ve lived in New York for a year and been together for almost two.

She doesn't lose that weird feeling, like she's living a dream sequence tacked onto her life, but eventually she decides that's just what being grown-up is about. After she finishes up her drafting program and gets a job doing technical illustration, it seems like there's only one thing missing. They talk about it a lot at night, lying on their queen-size bed in their new apartment, and finally Jim decides to go back for teaching certification. It makes perfect sense, once he brings it up.

She can't help but remember her failed attempt at an education major, years ago now, as she watches him get totally caught up in learning how to be a teacher. She visits him one day at his school placement, teaching English to seventh-graders, and he's so good at it that she gets a funny ache, pride mixed with jealousy. She could never do this. She's so glad that he can.

They still get into a couple of screaming fights about the commitment and time it takes, all his papers stacked up all over the apartment and his endless babble about students she's never met and can't keep straight, and finally she admits that his success is making her feel bad, saying it to the bedroom door after he's slammed it in her face. It's a really long time before he opens the door, maybe as much as a minute, but he's her boyfriend again when he finally does, a smile on his lips and an apology in his eyes.

Her parents keep bugging her about when they're going to get married, and she suspects his are too, but it's the last thing on her mind. Being engaged almost seems like a jinx, and it's not like she needs a piece of paper to know that he's hers. She doesn't want to plan a wedding, be fussed over, wonder who she should invite and how much it will cost. She doesn't want anything to change _them_ , living together and just trusting they'll both want to stay.

They still end up getting married somewhere around their fourth anniversary, right after he finishes his thesis, surrounded by as many family members as could be crammed into the city courthouse. They go to Florence for a month and spend the first week just lying in bed, watching the shadows change on the pale yellow walls of their little room, overlooking the river. It's the one big city they didn't get around to visiting on their trip, years ago, and she smiles to think that they would have been crammed into yet another hostel, eating cheap street food and washing out their underwear in the sink. She thinks that there was something about that life that they both needed then, though, and she asks him about it, brushing the hair from his forehead.

"Do you think we could have just kept living in Scranton, and still had this?"

He smiles, a little sadly. "No."

"Did you really want to change that much?"

He reaches up and takes her hand. "I don't think it was wanting."

"You had to change?'

"Didn't you?"

She presses her lips together, thinking. "Ever get the feeling like someone turned too many pages at once and suddenly you jumped to the wrong part of the story? Like you got the happy ending without earning your way there?"

His eyes are serious now, and she thinks of that dim, other life, when things were shallow and flat and grey, for so many years. "We earned it," he says.

When they get back home there's a letter in the mail granting him a master's degree, and the next month he starts teaching community college. She's thankful that he's out of the hellish public schools and away from the teenagers who drove him so crazy, making him too invested in their sordid personal problems and terrible grammar, and she teases him and calls him "professor" at home. They go to faculty functions and move into a townhouse and start traveling again in the summer. Sometimes she feels weird about not having her bachelor's degree, and she looks at all the books on the shelves that he's bought and read and understood, and it's this little wedge between them, but she can't be anything but happy for him, really.

Eventually he talks her into taking some studio art classes at his college, just to keep her hand in. She hasn't done much ceramic work before and she's surprised to find herself falling in love with the third dimension, shaping the walls of clay by hand and on the wheel. Her nails are always caked with grey chalk, and half her clothes are covered in splatters of slip and rust-red clay, and she just keeps turning out these _vessels_ , abstract, intricately-shaped containers that coil and teeter, smooth in some places and rough in others, and they're better than pretty much anything she's ever done.

The teachers in the department finally convince her to submit to something besides the student shows, and for the first time in almost five years of living in New York she starts spending time in the Village, working with a couple of gallery owners who are crazy enough, she thinks, to want to buy her art.

He's thrilled, utterly aglow with pride. Her parents don't really get her work, and neither do his, but they still come to her first few gallery shows, until they're common enough that even she gets tired of dressing up and drinking indifferent wine and explaining her creative process. He never gets tired of it, though.

She can't figure out why he's so set on finding an apartment with a backyard, since it almost always means less space inside, until the day she walks outside to a truck delivering a kiln. After that she quits her illustration job, promising to be available for freelance work, and spends her days at home, hair in her face as she works the wheel barefoot, making her arms strong by lifting out trays of delicate work from the kiln. He takes the second bedroom as a clay-free zone, filling it with his books and other valuables, and on weekends they swear they're going to do something about the rest of the place, but they always end up going out to dinner and coming home to collapse on the king-size cherrywood platform bed one of her design friends made for them, laughing as they undress each other.

On their third wedding anniversary, which they spend in Buenos Aires, they finally acknowledge the kid thing isn't ever going to happen. He teases that her clay pots are her children, and she teases back that he babies his books, and neither of them says that they don't really like kids as much as they should, and that they like traveling too much. He squeezes her hand and she orders another drink, something Spanish she can barely pronounce that nevertheless tastes delicious, and he talks about the zip-line canopy tour they're taking tomorrow.

In April of the following year, riding the train to meet with a journalist who's doing a tiny sidebar piece on her work for the _Voice_ , she realizes it's been ages since she got the funny feeling that her life was someone else's. Her clothes are nicer than the sad, dull things she used to wear in her twenties. Sometimes she forgets that she grew up in Scranton, PA, and that she used to answer phones for a living and that she was going to marry a guy who never read books and drove a truck. They don't even own a car, now.

The fact that she's forgotten to remember is so dizzying that it's worse than the original feeling, just layers upon layers of disorientation. Then her phone rings, and it's her husband, wanting to know where his passport is, and she can't help but smile.


End file.
